How old were you the first time you saw someone breastfeed their baby?

What did you think? How did you feel?

If you were very very young; before you could talk, or it was your mother, or your sister, or an auntie or family member and you nor they felt no shame; imagine how normal you would think nursing a baby would be. What if you never saw a bottle, or saw someone give a baby a bottle?

On the I Love Lucy Show, Ricky and Lucy, husband and wife slept in separate twin beds.  That was normal. On television, babies slept in cribs in separate rooms in another part of the house, they cried a lot, you  or someone (other than the mother) had to pick them up and give them a bottle so “it” and you could go back to bed presumably to sleep or back to sex with your spouse.

This wasn’t how it was at my house. But normal, or middle class, or appropriate was most often defined by someone else in the visual media.  What was the social or familial critique on child rearing and child bearing? What were you taught?

What if the first naked breast you saw was not your mothers and you were hiding or peeping or did not have permission to view an uncovered body part.  What if modesty was valued above all else and even viewing the breast or touching the breast or any body part even your own was suspect, and wrong, or sexual or all three.  It would make breastfeeding counter-intuitive, just plain odd, or novel and a curiosity of monumental proportions.

If the human breast has never been seen as a functional organ, how did you make the switch? If nursing was for puppies or kittens, but not human babies, then where does that leave you!

 If the breast is primarily a sexual fetish commodity, associated with mystery, illicit pleasure and indeed the property of someone else for whom sexual favors are exchanged; then nursing a child for one to two years would be virtually impossible.

What if you never saw a mother and baby couple? Mother and baby attached and not separated from one another until they were good and ready.

Please tell us your story of your first encounter with the breast yours or someone else’s?